


Swan Song

by kazluvsbooks



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Protective Dean Winchester, Sick Sam Winchester, Trials
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 13:57:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11314824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kazluvsbooks/pseuds/kazluvsbooks
Summary: He’d always assumed that death would be something a little wilder than this. That the one goddamn thing to take out Sam fucking Winchester would be a little uglier, a little less unraveling and a lot more smiting involved: blazing inferno, bullet between the teeth, the very bowels of hell opening up to swallow him whole.





	Swan Song

**Author's Note:**

> Written for me by the wonderful [dimpleforyourthoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimpleforyourthoughts/profile)   
>  for the[ nyxocity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyxocity/profile) auction. (thanks so much Amy)

 

 

 

 

Sam’s body is a living bruise. There are aches in his aches, tenderness bone deep, as if his  
very foundation has turned soft like clay. Unmaking. As if the years of abuse that come with  
saving the world have ﬁnally hit their breaking point, and his body has begun to disintegrate—  
cells coming apart in half lives as every ounce of him returns to the earth.

 

He’d always assumed that death would be something a little wilder than this. That the one  
goddamn thing to take out Sam fucking Winchester would be a little uglier, a little less  
unraveling and a lot more smiting involved: blazing inferno, bullet between the teeth, the very  
bowels of hell opening up to swallow him whole.

 

Death doesn’t happen that way in the end. Maybe that’s good, because it means Sam gets to  
actually say goodbye this time.

 

Or maybe it’s some sick irony, because Sam has always been terrible at those.

 

It's a damn miracle that Sam drags himself out of bed, and even then it's for the simple  
satisfaction of letting Dean—hovering in the hallway for the last hour—worry too much. He  
shufﬂes from the warm and musty space of his room to the kitchen space of the Bunker and at  
once his feet are cold, and his nose is running, and everything feels all at once a little hazy and  
far away. He's running a fever, and he knows it.

 

But better to suffer in silence than to tip Dean off to it.

 

"You know you're not hiding shit from me." Dean plants his feet, cupped in the divot of the  
counter, glaring. Always glaring. Like Sam's got a body buried in the hall closet, some massive  
secret cupped between his stingy palms.

   
"Who said anything about hiding?" Sam says dully, snifﬂing.

 

He sets about the task of making coffee. Cream. Two sugars. Blonde roast. Dean thinks it's  
sissy coffee-- _coffee was meant to be drunk one way and one way only Sammy, and that's_  
**_black_** _-_ -but Sam doesn't really care what Dean thinks. He's had enough of the nagging, and  
Dean, frankly, is the queen of it.

 

"We got a case to work?"

 

"Screw that. We're not going anywhere."

 

"Why not get work done while we can?"

 

"Because you look goddamn awful, you stubborn son of a bitch."

 

Sam's lips quirk upwards.

 

"There's gotta be something," he presses, snatching up the paper and thumbing to the  
obituaries section, the freak accidents and the undetermined causes, "There's always  
something."

 

"Don't go picking ﬁghts now, Sammy." Dean snatches the paper back, glaring something even  
ﬁercer. "I get that you're stir-crazy but Jesus Christ, let's not go ahead and run ourselves into the  
ground, shall we?"

 

"Fine." Sam snaps. "But I'm not staying cooped up in here. We're getting out and working a  
case or something or I'm going to lose my goddamn mind."

 

And Sam already is. It's cabin fever in the highest degree, and he feels awful. He always feels  
awful these days, but nothing's worse than the feeling of uselessness, of waiting around for  
things to get better and not being able to move until then.

 

It reminds him of being young again, that particular uselessness. Which is maybe why he hates  
it so much. It feels like being pinned down, like being thirteen and always waiting for Dad to  
come walking through the door after a case and tear up their lives at the roots like a green  
sapling, just when they'd begun to take the soil, begun to gain some ground. There was nothing  
Sam could do to prevent it, nothing he could do to ﬁght it. Not at thirteen. At thirteen it was  
always yes sir no sir and the muted self hatred that curled up in his belly afterward because  
taking orders felt like the only thing he was good for.

 

It ate at him for years, that uselessness, that errant waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Sam  
hated it so much that when he thinks about it--really thinks long and hard about it--he thinks  
that's what got him out. It wasn't the fact that they hunted monsters, it wasn't even the fact that  
by the time he was fourteen Sam knew how to kill a man seven different ways but not how to  
kiss a girl or rent a tux for the freshman dance.

 

It was that hatred of waiting that dragged his ass to the guidance counselor's ofﬁce, asking  
politely what were the best schools in the country and did they offer scholarships for kids with  
his grades. It's what put a ﬁre in his belly and the well placed tang of a _fuck you_ loaded in the  
back of his throat. He'd rather do anything, be anyone, break his goddamn neck working himself  
into the ground, than wait around for things to get better. For fate to fall in right into place.  
After all, in Sam's experience, he and fate weren't exactly on good terms.

 

He doesn't share this with Dean though. Dean tends to get up in arms when Sam says things  
like that.

 

Sam often thinks his brother is still living sixteen years in the past, trying to keep his little brother  
innocent. Keep him soft. Somewhere along the line, Dean put on his blinders. Dean stopped  
believing that Sam was ever capable of anything but gap toothed smiles and good intent.  
Even looking at Dean now, Sam can see his older brother fumbling for the right words to say.  
Like he's trying to put on kid gloves that he's long forgotten. He's gotten so used to Dean's  
bracing macho-man attitude. _Suck it up, Sam._ He was used to it, and he depended on it now  
more than ever.

 

Trust Dean to fuck it all up by suddenly starting to care.

 

He waits for Dean to say something gentle and forgiving. _Go back to bed Sam. You don't know  
what you're saying Sam. The trials are taking a lot of you, please rest Sam. _

 

 

"Let's go grocery shopping." Dean says instead.

 

Sam doesn't have the energy to smile or look relieved, but he feels its steady warmth in his  
chest just the same.

 

***

 

They ﬁnd a Trader Joe's in the next town over. Sam's favorite. He doesn't bother pointing out the  
local grocery store that's much closer to the Bunker (and where they usually shop half the time  
anyways) and Dean doesn't bring it up either. Just guns the gas and tears out of the garage and  
pumps some eighties hair metal music. Sam tilts his head out the window a bit like a dog, lets  
his hand make drifting wave motions in the wind, and reminds himself to breathe.

 

It feels good to be out in the world again, pushing through time and space in the Impala. Dean  
at the wheel. It's been almost a month since Sam has left the bunker, and the smell of the pine  
trees and of crisp air. He wants to bask in it, savor every second. Like a death row inmates last  
meal.

 

If he is dying. If that really is where all of this is headed (because in the back of his head he  
knows. He Knows.) Then he wants this to be the last thing he remembers of this earth. Cool air.  
Muddy grey skies of a morning, the sun pushing against them from behind like an angry bee  
caught in a jar, battering against the glass.

 

_I don't want to leave this_. He thinks sadly. But with that comes the whisper soft afﬁrmation, But I  
have to.

 

The trials, it turns out, are not just physical ones. In some ways, the mental hurdles are even  
worse. Sam tries not to even think of it, but it’s impossible. If his body is a living bruise, his mind  
is a sore. Oozing, infected. There'd been a time where he'd made peace with himself--before  
Dean came back, before Amelia left--where Sam had cast off the blame and the self-hatred and  
thought okay. _This is me. And I don't hate myself for that_. But the trials complicated everything.  
The trials took a regular thought the warped it, turned it intrusive, turned it blackened with a rot  
that grew inside his mind. Again, it made Sam feel impossibly young. The fear of himself, of  
what he could do, festering away in him.

 

In a twisted way, Sam has always considered himself a bit suicidal. You don't go to hell and  
back, you don't go brawling with the forces of heaven and hell themselves without being just a  
little bit hungry to die. But being a step behind wanting to die is wholly different than ﬂirting with  
the idea of death, of thinking, nearly romanticizing how the rest of the world would probably  
better off without the stain of your mess mucking it up.

 

Wanting to die when you owe the world your life is a tricky thing. Mostly Sam's just tired. Mostly  
Sam just wants the head noise to stop and everything to slow down.  
He doesn't have that luxury though, so for now Sam keeps eyes on the winding road ahead,  
mind a thousand miles behind.

 

The parking lot is barren and the chill emitting from the frozen food section makes Sam shiver,  
bundle tighter into his jacket. He's aware--always so damn aware--of Dean's sharp eye on him,  
but Sam just ignores him, walks though the stores and puts random healthy things in the cart.  
Makes a bare minimum effort.

 

"Gonna get some of those burritos you like," Sam mutters, and leaves Dean to pick out  
sandwich ingredients and freshly made sourdough. The smell of the food makes Sam want to  
throw up despite the fact that he is goddamn starving. The trials don't seem to like it when Sam  
eats anything that isn't liquid, but the sensitivity to smells is a new thing.

   
If he keeps this up, he's not sure how much longer he's going to last.

 

To keep from passing out, because it suddenly seems very likely, Sam runs his head through  
checklists in his head, ingrained from childhood. Grounds himself in the familiar and the  
habitual. Lock the door. Salt the door and the windows. Don't answer the phone. If it's Dean it'll  
ring twice and then you can pick up.

 

In case of emergency, always safe to salt and burn anything involved in a case. Break into the  
graveyard. Wear dark colors.

 

How to draw a sigil. How to recite a exorcism. How to get out blood stains.

 

How to bury a body.

 

Dean will get a refresher on that one pretty sure.

 

Sam knows he can probably get around the salt and burn part. They burned Dad. They burned  
Charlie. They burned Bobby.

 

Sam doesn’t know whether or not Dean ever burned a pyre for him after Lawrence. It makes  
sense that he wouldn't. After all, Sam was gone in his entirety, there really hadn't been a body to  
burn in the ﬁrst place.

 

Still, Sam thinks. He wishes there were a way for him to disappear all over again. It was clean,  
the drop off into hell. One minute Sam Winchester was on earth, and the next he was not.  
But the way this death, his death, was going this time around, Sam was not too optimistic. This  
death would be messy, and embarrassing. He wasn't sure how his body would warp and contort  
towards the bitter end, how much the magic of the trials would strip him down until nothing  
remained but skin and bones.

 

Dean would have to burn the bones. Dean would have to salt the skin. Dean would have to light  
the pyre and watch it all go to ash.

 

And he'd have to do it all alone. Again.

 

"Hey." Dean strides up to where Sam is standing in the frozen food aisle, a bag of peas clutched  
in one hand, and a bag of asparagus in the other. Somewhere amidst choosing between frozen  
greens he'd gone and found himself in the middle of a panic attack.

 

"Hey," Now the tone is urgent, and rough hands are prying the peas and asparagus from Sam  
hands that are forming claws, forming ﬁsts, trying to remember how to breathe.

 

You'd think, after all this time, that he'd be used to death by now.

 

Funny thing about the human body though, is how much it truly wants to live. Sam read once  
about drowning. About how even when you are drowning, trying to hold your breath in, your  
lungs pleading for oxygen, the very second before you pass out your body will inhale one last  
time. It doesn't matter that your mind is screaming not to, because the only thing that will be  
heading for your lungs will be water. It doesn't matter. The human body wants to live. And that  
inhale just before death is an almost hypnotizing moment of relief. Before your lungs realize it's  
water they've breathed, before you begin to convulse and shudder and really, truly, die.

 

"Sammy."

 

Dean's hand in his hair, Sam's got his nose pressed to Dean's shoulder and he's sure people  
are staring at them but he's having a hard time remembering how to breathe. How to give up,  
how to throw out that last attempt at life before all the struggle goes out of him.  
Before he goes under.

 

"I'm okay." Sam gasps, shuddering, mind a dark and groggy place. _Just let me die,_ he thinks. _I'm  
so tired. Just let me die. Just please let me die. _

 

"You're not." Dean drags Sam out of the store with a bag of groceries, and Sam can't remember  
when they went to the register and he's going to kick Dean's ass if Dean didn't pay the cashier.

 

"You're not, jesus fucking christ Sam, get in the goddamn car."

 

The cold air slaps Sam's cheeks but he gulps it like it's water.

 

He can feel more than he can see Dean hovering, always hovering, hands ﬂexing at his sides  
like he's not sure whether he wants to check Sam's temperature or slap some sense into him.

 

Sam leans against the side of the impala, staring up at the wide grey of the sky, no longer able  
to spot the insistent sun.

 

"This sucks." He ﬁnally says, voice low and raspy, like he'd been shouting himself hoarse  
moments before. "This really fucking sucks."

 

His throat feels strangled, like he just got out of a chokehold. If his appetite was the ﬁrst to go,  
he wonders if his voice is next.

 

Dean doesn't move, doesn't speak, for a few minutes. He does, however, open the hood of the  
car. Starts tinkering, checking the engine, some bullshit like that. Normally Sam would roll his  
eyes--Dean can never seem to open up unless he's focused on something else. But the  
sameness of routine is too tempting to balk at. Dean tinkers. Sam sits.

Then:

 

"Did I ever tell you about the story about the swan?"

 

Sam raises an eyebrow. "No."

 

"Think I was about thirteen, maybe fourteen. You were asleep in the backseat, coming off that  
one hunting trip we had up in Manitoba. We were driving on the dirt road in the middle of  
nowhere, trees all around. Listening to the radio. Nothing could wake you, Sammy. You were  
dead to the world.

 

“Couple miles from our campsite, we came across this swan in the middle of the road. Thought  
it was dead at ﬁrst, hit by some other asshole. But it was still alive. Crooning. Blood on its  
feathers. It's neck was broken, I think. I'd never seen one so big before. It was beautiful, and it  
was dying."

 

Dread begins to ﬂex its ﬁngers in Sam's throat. He thinks he knows where this story is going.

 

“Dad accelerated,” Dean says this part very matter of fact, but his grip are tight on the engine,  
whatever part of the car they’re buried in. “Killed the swan dead. There were feathers stuck  
between the windshield wiper. Barely felt the bump under the wheels, and all the while you were  
in the backseat, sleeping like a baby.”

 

Sam grits his teeth. This is the part he hates the most. The notion that there was shit—so much  
shit, _too_ much shit—that Dean had to deal with, and did so willingly, so that Sam wouldn’t have  
to. He hates that it’s been a decade since they’ve reunited—Sam and Dean back on the road  
again—and he still doesn’t know about half of the shit.

 

“I was traumatized,” Dean says, slow and careful. “Thought I’d throw up. I’d already killed,  
burned graves, had blood on my hands. But those white feathers caught in the windshield  
wipers were suddenly the worst thing I’d ever seen.

 

“And Dad said to me…” Dean’s mouth twitches now, a bastardized wince disguised as a wry  
smile. “He said to me ‘Do you know why I did that, Dean? Why I had to?’”

 

A lesson in power. In who chooses life and death. In mercy to the suffering with a way to end it  
all.

 

“I said I did, yes sir, I understood,” parrots Dean, “But I never meant a word. You don’t just give  
up and kill the thing that’s broken. Not while it can be saved.”

 

Sam can close his eyes, picture it all in Technicolor, high deﬁnition and sound. The neck bent at  
an odd angle, like a skinny arm with a knobby elbow. White feathers caught in the grate of a  
black hearse with a roaring engine. The crooning of a swan song.

 

“You’re going to be ﬁne,” says Dean, not to Sam so much as the open air around them. He sets  
the groceries in the trunk, frozen peas and all. “You’re stronger, and a hell of a lot meaner than  
half the broken things out there, Sam. You’re gonna beat this thing, no problem.”

 

_But what if I can’t._ Sam doesn’t have the strength to speak the fear. _What if I don’t. What if I just  
let you down, let the world down, all over again. _

 

_What if I die and I stay dead_ , he wants to say.

 

_What if I leave you alone, again._

 

_What if I fail._

 

“Let me drive,” is what Sam stays instead, pickpocketing Dean mid grocery-manhandle and  
unlocking the driver side door. “Don’t worry. I won’t crash. I’ll even be nice and let you DJ.”

 

Dean smiles bright, and it’s a success. Dean whistles along to the radio on the drive back, and  
that’s a success too. They take the scenic route for a few hours and make a poor man’s veggie  
egg scramble. Sam manages to force down at least half of it before he fakes exhaustion and a  
nap so he can go and throw it all up.

 

It’s okay though. It’s okay.

 

Dean won’t have to have mercy if Dean doesn’t know anything’s wrong.

 

And Sam doesn’t have much time left to spend faking.

 

 


End file.
